China Moves to Stop Spam Texts

Over this past weekend, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) released a new policy that should be a welcome relief for the country’s billion-plus mobile phone users: telecom companies are no longer allowed to send you text messages you don’t want.

Specifically, the new regulations ban telecommunications companies from texting subscribers with any messages subscribers haven’t agreed to receive, and also bans them from continuing to text subscribers messages that the subscriber has explicitly stated they do not want to receive. MIIT has also asked China’s telecom companies to upgrade their internal systems for filtering out third-part spam texts.

Of course, it’s not clear exactly how MIIT intends to enforce this ban, and if it’s self-policed on the part of the telecoms, I wouldn’t expect to be recieving fewer garbage texts anytime soon. MIIT has actually been pressuring telecom companies to put a stop to text spam for a while now. It’s starting to feel like perhaps everyone will have moved to WeChat by the time things are fully sorted out, but nevertheless, any effort to reduce annoying spam is definitely a good thing. Here’s hoping MIIT can keep China’s telecoms in line.